With the higher clock speed
comes a higher performing T&L engine, this time around it weighs in at 31
million triangles per second. While NVIDIA has definitely been pushing the T&L
bandwagon for quite some time, we have truly yet to see a game that takes advantage
of T&L to the point where it looks or performs noticeably worse without
hardware T&L support.

An example of one such game
is Shiny's Sacrifice which is due out later this year.

We were lucky enough to
get a pre-release copy of it and managed to take some screenshots with T&L
enabled and without it:

T&L
Off

T&L
On

Click
Here to download the uncompressed versions of the above graphics

As you can
probably tell, there is virtually no difference between the above two screenshots,
the game looks just as good with T&L off as it does with T&L on. The
performance is pretty similar although on slower machines having T&L on
does definitely help out the frame rate. It seems like T&L implementations
in games is still not as dramatic as NVIDIA & ATI would like it to be, not
yet at least.

We managed
to pay a visit to Epic not too long ago and take a look at what they're working
on for their upcoming followup to UnrealTournament and let's just say that with
the number of polygons they are planning to use in the characters, T&L will
definitely be helpful.